Writer L. M. Kit Carson and director Hooper have made Chainsaw 2 a grisly hoot: a wild satire on modern Texas and horror movies themselves. [31 Aug 1986, p.15]

Don’t let the cartoonlike ads for Reform School Girls fool you. The movie has been billed as an outlandish sendup of the women-behind-bars genre, but that’s just wishful thinking--or part of the movie’s cynical hype. “Girls” is far too feeble to qualify as a raunchy prison parody. It’s more of a brainless homage, in the clunky way that “Rambo” and “Missing in Action” paid tribute to “The Green Berets.”

Anger? Outrage? Are these new feelings for audiences dealing with the fact of rape--aborted or not? You might hope not, but if they are, the film generates them, as well as the shamefully satisfying taste of bone-cracking revenge. But they still don’t add up to reason enough to make a movie, or to make it in 1986.

What makes The Fly such a stunning piece of obsessive film making is the way Cronenberg deftly allows us to identify with his monstrous creation. [14 Aug 1986]

The first 15 minutes have some funny bits, but the movie winds up sapping you. It's a kind of whoopee-cushion nightmare, as if you woke up one morning and noticed that everyone on the street was drooling on his or her tie.

The Boy Who Could Fly is as fragile as a kite, yet it’s kept aloft by the commitment of writer-director Nick Castle and the talent and presence of lovely young Lucy Deakins, who has that crucial gift of catching us up in her imagination.

Savage Steve Holland's One Crazy Summer is a zesty hot-weather tonic, light and sparkling, and a fine follow-up to last fall's "Better Off Dead," Holland's knockout debut feature. As impossible as it seems just now, Holland actually finds fresh approaches to the youth comedy. [12 Aug 1986, p.C5]

Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It is a joyfully idiosyncratic little jazz-burst of a film, full of sensuous melody, witty chops and hot licks

It’s not really a bad movie. In some ways, it’s a better directed farce than the current hits “Back to School” or “Legal Eagles.” But it’s erratic, and often weightless or uncentered; the pieces keep flying apart.

In an effort to generate some excitement (and disguise the limits of the animation) director Nelson Shin keeps the camera constantly in motion. The Transformers has so many cuts that it looks like the film was developed in a Veg-O-Matic. Because it features ineptly blended drawn animation and computer graphics, The Transformers is billed as state-of-the-art. It seems more like state-of-the-marketing. [08 Aug 1986, p.8]

The imagination of the opening is a hint of what the movie might have been: a view of our world that made kids consider it from another angle--as well as a spoof of the superhero. But what are all the pleasant duck effects in the face of any of this numbing waste?

Whereas its plot may be derivative--and at several junctures, unconvincing--Flight of the Navigator nevertheless manages to develop considerable humor and poignancy from David's predicament and what he does about it.

Sad excuse for a movie. [4 Aug 1986, p.C6]

Nothing in Common starts out like yet another yuppie Tom Hanks comedy--until it takes off in a surprising and unexpectedly rewarding direction. Never has Hanks or Jackie Gleason been better.

Maximum Overdrive offers a variation on what has become a hopelessly hackneyed theme -- technology as monster. As long as King is tinkering with his crazed machines, the film sustains a certain amount of ominous tension, but as soon as the author turns his attention to his actors, the movie's slender storyline goes limp. It's dreary to the max.

You can fret at Heartburn's flimsiness, may even find it insufferably smug in its portrait of our set, but you probably won't be bored by it. And it is peopled with adults, these days enough to make you whimper in gratitude. If only these talents were in the service of something.

But even if Hitchcock’s chase thrillers were the inspiration, with their falsely accused heroes fleeing police through exotic landscapes, the master wouldn’t have approved of this tribute. Logic, character, coherence, psychology--all those vital thriller elements disappear as quickly as the Iowa corn.

Haunted Honeymoon is an amusing, bouncy horror comedy that has fun with not only the old-dark-house genre but also those corny but beloved scare shows of the Golden Age of Radio.

But of all the film's choices, the best was Weaver. She's its white-hot core, given fine, irascible dialogue to come blazing out of that patrician mouth, and the chance to look, for a moment, like a space-dusted Sleeping Beauty in her hyper-sleep casket.

Pirates has its sly, funny moments, but ironically ends up a work by a sophisticated film maker that may be best left to the least demanding audiences.

A frenetically unfunny and charmless movie.

Tender, marvelously well played (by almost everyone) and thoroughly engaging. When it comes to the current sexual skirmishes between men and women, screenwriters Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue (Second City alumni) know every inch of enemy territory and take no prisoners.

Big Trouble in Little China is a try at mock-Oriental movie magic that goes leaden about a third of the way through -- and finally detonates into great, whomping firebombs of overcalculated, underinspired absurdity. [02 July 1986, p.10]

Psycho III--better in most respects than II--lets you down with the same swampy thud at the end. It's not a catastrophe. It has some good writing, and some better-than-good acting (Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey), directing (Perkins again) and camera work (Bruce Surtees). But it fails any sequel's acid test: It feeds off the original without deepening it.

The Great Mouse Detective reflects the energy and enthusiasm of a talented group of young artists stretching their wings for the first time. That group has gone on to produce some truly extraordinary work, win awards and earn sums no one believed could be made from an animated film. And, as has often been the case at Disney, it all began with a mouse.

A dismal flop that will probably be Exhibit A for years to come in any debate over the wisdom of letting pop stars make their own vanity Hollywood projects. [04 Jul 1986, p.7]

There's more length than depth to Labyrinth. The Baryshnikov staging of "The Nutcracker" has more to tell about a girl on the edge of young womanhood, with more poignancy and a more palpable sense of transition, than all the technical wizardry Henson and crew have offered so lavishly-and without a single pop song, either. [26 Jun 1986, p.1]

So much of Ruthless People goes so far that maybe it was inevitable that the film makers would pull up short and make this half-sappy compromise--cynicism with a smile--as compensation for their previous audacity. A pity. A lot of the rest gives you something better: full-bore, shameless, gut-clutching laughter.